Last week, Twin Cities television anchor/reporter Jessica Miles filed a federal lawsuit alleging that her driver's license information was illegally searched about 1,380 times and her husband's 92 times. At the federal set amount of $2,500 per incident, the damages could amount to $3.5 million.
And earlier this month, 18 Minnesota residents and former residents alleged that dozens of public employees had looked up driver's license data because the citizens had been critical of Wabasha County. They claim that public officials have accessed their private data for political reasons more than 600 times since 2003. That case could generate $1 million-plus in damages.
The plaintiffs are among dozens of people who have sued a number of local and state government agencies in the past year after obtaining information from the Department of Public Safety that public employees had illegally accessed their private records.
As the number of cases has grown, this page has called for clarification in federal and state rules to better balance privacy concerns with reasonable damages to avoid huge government payouts. Bottom line: Damage amounts per incident should better reflect the harm done.
Any changes should include placing more of the liability on individual offenders, rather than on their government employers. Incidents of illegal data snooping would drop dramatically if the people who broke the law had to pay the penalty.
Local governments are subject to these suits largely because of the Driver's Privacy Protection Act (DPPA), a federal law passed in 1994 after an actress was murdered by a stalker who used public data to find her. The law outlines permissible uses of the data and provides for at least $2,500 in damages for each improper lookup.
The act grew out of the sensible notion that government should release the information states require for a driver's license — name, address, height, weight, age, eye color and a photo — for legitimate reasons only.
Complicating the matter, though, is that the Minnesota cases involve government workers — many from law enforcement — who frequently look up such information in the course of their work.